Life Goes On

It's impossible to comment on all the political and economic actions that have been taken recently, and those that are being contemplated. It boggles the mind.

I think it would be a good thing if every American would read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, as well as the Federalist Papers. We need to remind ourselves of what America is all about. I have linked to Yale Law School's Avalon Project, but there are a number of good sources for these types of historical documents on the internet.

Now, more than ever, we need a smaller government with much less interference in our lives and businesses. It was government interference that got us into the mess we're in today. It was not capitalism or conservatism or any of the other popular scapegoats. Stop the bailouts, stop high taxes, stop forced charity, stop over-regulation, stop judicial activism, and stop a Congress and an Executive Branch that thinks they can ignore the Constitution.

I need to stop myself--I'm getting into a rant! That brings me to another problem. It is so easy to criticize and rant and otherwise be negative. What we (I) should do instead is discuss positive things that we need to do to preserve and expand the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that is America. We can start by becoming familiar with our founding documents, as I noted in the second paragraph above. We also need to learn American history and government. You need to select your reading material carefully in order to get accurate information. Look at older books on American history and government, and look at a variety of books and websites. Variety will at least show you discrepancies which you can research further.

Recently a study was released that showed that Americans in general do not know much about civics and how government is supposed to work. We cannot depend on schools at any level to correct this lack of knowledge, so we need to teach ourselves. That link reports on the study and also contains a link to the 33 questions that were asked so that you can test yourself.

I think that a lot of the problems we have in America are due to lack of knowledge by the American people and by those we elect to represent us. Self-education in civics, government, and history can only help. I know I also have a lot more to learn. A lot of well-meaning folk nevertheless have wrongheaded ideas about solutions, so an openess to learning truth and to thinking things through is also important.

We all need more patience, with ourselves and with others. It's easy to get fired up about something, but we aren't always making ourselves understood when we get carried away. I know I get wound up because America is so very important, not just to those who live here, but to the world. I can't promise I won't get wound up about something again, but I'll try to be calm and clear!

It's difficult to express what I want to say here. There are those who think all things are equal and it is just a matter of voting to do Plan A or Plan B. The thing is that all things are NOT equal. Truth is truth. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. I don't know how people get to the place of thinking that all is equal. I personally blame indoctrination in public schools, but there are other factors as well, such as biased media (and yes, my blog is biased, too, but at least it is biased toward truth, although I am sure there are those who will say that is just my opinion--more of that "all things are equal" stuff). I don't know if we can ever get down to a real discussion of real issues, but I hope we will continue to try.

The Encyclopedia of Life Has a Lot More Content Now

The Encyclopedia of Life has had a website up for a year or more with minimal content (6 demonstration pages), but now they have 25 complete pages, about 30,000 partial pages, and a million or so minimal pages. If you had given up on them ever getting more up, now is the time to go explore! You can register for free and the encyclopedia is meant to always be free, to provide information about all life on earth to everyone everywhere. Lots of interesting stuff there now and to come in the future. It's scheduled for completion in 2017.

If you register, you can sign up to get their quarterly newsletter in your email. They are having a contest to name the newsletter. Also, later this year, they plan to make it possible for anyone to contribute photos and content to be reviewed for inclusion. This is a great site for anyone interested in science and nature and for anyone taking classes along those lines. Kids will enjoy learning more about common plants and animals they see around their homes or getting information for school.

I know I sound like an advertisement, but I have no connection to the encyclopedia except as an interested reader. I just think that it'll be a fascinating place to learn.

World View

I have been thinking about how each person has a world view, or perspective, on life. Where does this come from? How do we know whether our world view is a good one or not?

I think that beginning in childhood, we accumulate various influences that affect how we see life and the world. It begins with being influenced by (or rebelling against) our parents. We see their example in word and deed and form opinions about that. Once we start church attendance and school attendance, we are influenced by the various teachers we have, as well as our peers. This continues through high school and college. We begin to be influenced by media, whether it is newspapers, television, magazines, etc. Particularly persuasive speakers or writers may sway us more than we realize. We end up with a world view created by a hodge-podge of influences, some of which were accepted without any real thought.

Now that we are mature adults, it seems to me a good idea to reconsider our opinions and ideas and try to trace where they came from and if they are any good. This can be difficult, but it is better than drifting along without thought.

In my opinion, God and the scriptures are the best source for learning what life is about and what we should do with the life we've been given. Of course, our world view can influence how we interpret scriptures and what course we follow in choosing a religion or choosing to reject religion.

Other sources for learning are history and literature. If we read widely in these areas, we will get a more accurate picture of what works and what doesn't than we would if we restrict our reading to only those authors we know already agree with our perspective and opinions. Even the most objective of writers will be somewhat biased because of his world view. It's the same with teachers. Anyone who is in a position to select what material is presented and how it is presented allows at least some subconscious decisions to enter into the mix. That is why we should look to more than one source to educate ourselves.

As for choosing what to believe, that becomes an individual choice. The hope would be that we would do our best to choose based on facts rather than persuasive writing/teaching or what sounds good on the surface. We should learn to think things through and consider the consequences of whatever choice we are thinking about. Does it bring good into our lives and the lives of others, or does it bring bad?

Sometimes facts aren't enough. Faith enters into our choices, too. We think of faith as a religious term, but everyone has faith in whatever they choose to believe--evolution, atheism, Marxism, feminism, and other "isms" require faith from their followers. They require faith that the propositions are correct and good, whether they are or not. So it is actually a mix of facts and faith that form our world views.

Different people have different issues that concern them, so they look to different sources for answers. What concerns me is that sometimes people come to see problems where there are none simply because whatever world view they have arrived at conditions them to see things from a narrow perspective--if they are oriented to look for oppression everywhere, they will see oppression everywhere because that is what they have trained their minds to conclude upon viewing just about anything. So then we need to ask ourselves if we are being realistic or if we have bought into one philosophy to such an extent that we no longer see things as they really are. That can be difficult to sort out because we will have a tendancy to think that we are seeing reality, even when we are not.

I don't know the best way to evalute our world view and see whether it is good or not. The only thing I know to do is to consider the sources of our viewpoints and also to think through the consequences of having those viewpoints. It would also help to know what other viewpoints there are out in the world--that's where reading widely comes into play--so that we can consider those as well.

I said I didn't know the best way, but actually I do. It's just that it won't be acceptable to some. My best way is to consider all things in light of the scriptures and to pray about them, and to listen to God's prophets and apostles, found in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For those who don't turn to religion, well, you can still read widely and think things through and do the best you can to sort out whether your views are reasonable or not.

One reason I have been thinking about all this today is the presidential election coming up in 2008 and all the candidates with all their ideas about how the United States of America should be run. We voters have a responsibility to make the best choice possible when we cast our votes in the primaries and in the general election. Some candidates have ideas that sound good on the surface, but when thought through, one realizes that those ideas will mean very high taxes, government interference, and/or wrecking the economy. They might mean loss of freedoms. So we need to consider things carefully and not cast our votes for reasons that won't lead this country and its people where they should go.

It's complicated, but giving conscious thought to our beliefs and opinions and ideas can make a big difference in how much good can come from our lives. I haven't covered nearly all that can go into this type of thinking and considering and each person will have his own ideas about it, but I hope that I have given you something to ponder.

The State of Academia

I love education--reading, studying, thinking, writing. It is all so wonderful. Because of my love of learning, it makes me incredibly sad to view the state of our educational systems here in the United States, from kindergarten right on through to the universities. They have been drifting away from teaching and getting into indoctrinating, the very antithesis of what they should be doing to prepare young people for life and for the future.

At FrontPage Magazine there is an article about the University of California at Santa Cruz titled "The Worst School in America" by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin. While the article could have used some serious proofreading, the content is important information for all of us to know about, whether we are taxpayers or sending children to school or citizens concerned about the direction our country is headed in. The article is long, but well worth the time to read.

UCSC is a public university funded by taxpayers. Yet they are violating academic standards right and left and openly training radical activists of all stripes. Many other schools teach some of these same types of courses. Education is supposed to be about teaching students to read, write, and think with clarity, and to study multiple viewpoints, objective facts, scientific studies, and the like. It is not supposed to be about the egregious violation of these academic principles.

I hope people will wake up and investigate what is being taught at schools they send their children and/or their donations to. This is serious, folks.

Some Links

I have added links to my sidebar now and again, but there are four new ones I especially want to point out because they belong to a friend, Confutus. He has quite a project started having to do with an outline of knowledge and also showing how various subjects connect with one another. The sites he has set up are as follows:

Sapience Knowledge Base

Independent Learning Forum (can also be accessed from the SKB home page)

Independent Learning (blog)

From the Ground (this is more of a political blog)

Come visit these sites and leave comments on the blogs or discuss independent learning on the forum. Anyone who is interested in continued learning will probably find something they are interested in. Also, homeschoolers and unschoolers (a term new to me!) will probably find this useful, too.

"The Encyclopedia of Life"

There is a new web resource just starting up called The Encyclopedia of Life. It is an ambitious undertaking by scientists to post pages on every form of life discovered. The press release says:

Many of the world’s leading scientific institutions today announced the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life, an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered.

The press release is a fairly long article and you can read all of it on the link provided above. Very interesting. Another paragraph states:

Over the next 10 years, the Encyclopedia of Life will create Internet pages for all 1.8 million species currently named. It will expedite the classification of the millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued as well. The pages, housed at http://www.eol.org, will provide written information and, when available, photographs, video, sound, location maps, and other multimedia information on each species. Built on the scientific integrity of thousands of experts around the globe, the Encyclopedia will be a moderated wiki-style environment, freely available to all users everywhere.

Demonstration pages are available here. FAQs are here and answer a lot of questions you may have about this project. You can register here and get email updates. I'm going to do that because this looks fascinating. It will be a long-term project, obviously, but a very interesting one. I read a note about it somewhere (I'm sorry I can't remember where.), but I think it will be something we can all enjoy and benefit from.

Some Thoughts on Learning

brianj's comment on my previous post has got me to thinking about learning and formulating conclusions. He said:

"it would be more useful scientifically to discuss the shortcomings of the theory."

Do you feel this way about all science, or just evolution? What percentage of "facts" taught in schools, would you say, are without controversy or ambiguity? Is it limited to biological science, or does it also apply to history, law, physics, art, etc?

I replied:

Oh, I feel this way about any and every subject. It just seems as though evolution is given a pass. As for a percentage of facts without controversy or ambiguity, I wouldn't be able to say. Any subject that lends itself to interpretation, which is just about every one of them, can have at least some controversy or ambiguity. What concerns me is when things begin to be interpreted in only one way, when there isn't adequate support of evidence for doing so. If something is true, it will stay true through the rigors of honest investigation. Perhaps we rush to decide that something is a fact, when there needs to be further research and testing. Perhaps we let our biases determine too much (and really, us being human, this is always a problem).

(BTW, thanks for your questions, brianj!)

Very seldom do any of us simply list facts. We interpret them to illustrate a point, to reach a conclusion. Even if the facts themselves are very uncontroversial and unambiguous, we create a certain controversy or ambiguity when we begin to interpret them. Yet how else are we to progress in our learning? So interpretation in and of itself is not a bad thing. It is, in fact, a necessary part of learning to put things together and thereby make progress.

I suppose what frustrates me is when an interpretation is one-sided and is then taught in schools as if it were the only correct interpretation. This is much of my quarrel with evolution and with history and with just about any subject you can think of. Certain views become popular, for whatever reason, and then become so entrenched in society that other views are suppressed or even condemned. What does this do to honest learning? It stifles honest learning. It closes avenues of investigation that might (or might not) lead to the truth.

It is true that this happens on both sides of any issue. We seem to become quite fond of a certain viewpoint and we stick with it no matter what. We become protective of it. We attack anyone who disagrees with it. Then what?

I know I do not find it easy to listen attentively to viewpoints that I disagree with and I am sure that others do not find it easy to listen to my viewpoints if they do not agree. Still, that is probably the best solution--to maintain a certain open-mindedness. Otherwise, we might miss out on a truth, either because the other person can teach us that truth or because in our search to learn more about what he said, we find either that we already had the truth or that the truth is actually a third option that we had not yet considered.

Of course, it doesn't do to not formulate some conclusions that we can stick with--convictions, if you will. We don't want to be forever vacillating from one view to another to another. That isn't a good way to become an educated person. There comes a time when we should choose what we believe to be true, using our best thinking to come to the best conclusion we can. Even then, new facts may make it necessary to change our mind, but changing our mind shouldn't come about merely because someone disagreed with us, or said we were ignorant, or some equally foolish reason. (And that happens on both sides of any issue.)

I have some fairly firm viewpoints on politics and science, as evidenced by this blog. In some ways, these viewpoints are the products of a lifetime, tempered by new information as it becomes available. I share them because I believe they are important to at least be considered by all. I may be a bit assertive at times--it is a reaction to some past disagreements, I suppose, and to things written by those with differing viewpoints. It is a reaction (over-reaction?) to those who think that I am the one who needs to change my mind, never considering that they may be wrong, at least on some points. I think I will overcome that as I write more. I have longed to express myself on politics and science and other issues and this blog gives me an outlet for that. In addition, it helps me refine and correct my views and express them more clearly.

Thinking about how we learn and reach conclusions is an interesting exercise in and of itself.